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Herman Cain Is Going to Try Plan B Now

On Saturday, the former GOP frontrunner announced he was suspending his presidential campaign. But hardcore Herminators weren't quite ready to say goodbye

There were three-dollar barbecue sandwiches. There was an old man attached to an oxygen tank, and another, next to him, savoring a cigar. There was a pair of overalls, two trench coats, and various skirts, jeans, and pressed-khakis bearing stickers and pins. There was a farmer and a lawyer and an out-of-work architect. There were Georgia Bulldogs shirts and caps worn by men hoping to be back in front of their televisions by 4 p.m. for the big game against LSU. There were children brought by their parents, and children who'd made their parents come. There was a DJ who played Dave Matthews ("Ants Marching"), Rascal Flatts ("Me and My Gang"), Tom Cochrane ("Life is a Highway"), and a crowd-silencing reggae tune from the Happy Feet soundtrack. There was a dog wearing a sweater that said "Corgis for Cain."

There were ladies there, too, on this warm early winter Saturday—many who looked eerily like Ginger White, Karen Kraushaar and Sharon Bialek—proudly advertising the gender of their support: Women for Herman Cain. There was a blogger from _The New York Times _talking to a blogger from The Economist (who appeared star-struck by his handsome young colleague); they both interviewed the gray-bearded man with a musket from Brunswick, Georgia, who feigned a British accent, wore revolutionary garb, and read loudly from a worn-out copy of the Constitution.

And there were all the others, most of them white and middle-aged, waiting for Herman Cain to come out onto the small stage in front of the brand new Cain Campaign Headquarters, next to a giant store called Champion (windows, siding, patio rooms) on DeKalb Technology Parkway, just off Interstate 85, in northeast Atlanta. There were perhaps three hundred of them there, in all. A few shouted, "The best way to beat Obama is with a Cain," and "Down with kings in The White House!" And they waited, some of them for four hours, to hear Herman Cain finally announce that it's time for "Plan B. And I call it 'TheCainSolutions.com.' Let me explain why."

But before Herman Cain arrived at Plan B, he tried to explain why, there was, for a strange window of time, his surprisingly successful Plan A: to become the next president of the United States of America. Or so we believed. And that's why this group of Americans showed up on Saturday, to wait for Herman Cain—The Herminator, conductor of The Cain Train—to wave away the latest round of unwelcome news, "these false and unproved allegations" as he repeatedly called them. To press on with his unique brand of fidelity, certainty, and history. That's why the remaining true believers waited and waited and waited under the blue sky, eating dry barbecue, listening to a middling blues band, speaking in nines, downwind from eleven news vans pumping out exhaust. But the catharsis they were waiting for did not come.

It didn't come for a mother of three boys from Jasper, Georgia, who'd driven an hour to sign up canvassers and cheerily enlighten the unconverted. Her chubby son Michael, a seventh-grader, walked away with the extra signs they'd brought. Her youngest, unsure why, began to cry.

It didn't come for the half dozen largely unknown speakers who preceded Cain at the podium, who talked about "loyalty above all else, except honor," who presciently said "this long shot may not be a long shot any longer," and who, in one woman's uncomfortably personal phrasing, called Cain "my warm-hearted man."

It didn't come for Cain's staff, either—mostly short, stout men who had claimed not to know what the candidate was going to do. That morning, Cain's Georgia press secretary had said, optimistically, "It doesn't feel like the end, does it?"

Catharsis didn't even come for the journalists covering Cain, many of whom had come to like him, and would miss the double-entendre opportunities he brought to their work. They hash-tagged their obituary tweets—"Is he pulling out?" etc.— with #cainrally. (Another tag option appeared as you spelled C-A-I-N: #CannabisCup, the famous weed competition, which took place in late November, in Amsterdam). Strange, in all ways, to the end.

Cain finished his twenty-three minute valedictory speech by once again quoting Pokémon ("Life can be a challenge...") to lukewarm applause, then making a pledge: "I will still be promoting the biggest change and transfer of power out of Washington D.C., back to the people, since this nation began—and that is the 9-9-9 plan. It's not going away." Someone in the disbanding crowd shouted more numbers: "2016! 2016!" But no one joined in.

When it was over, a love song—one of the best ever, in this journalist's opinion—began to play: Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell's "Ain't No Mountain High Enough." A beautiful way to end anything: a love affair, a long drive, a campaign. But the song did not belong to Herman and Gloria Cain, who stood smiling (with relief?) behind her husband. Nor did it belong to Herman Cain and his few remaining supporters. His campaign hadn't chosen it. A fat man in a red sweater hired to DJ the event that day, who worked a Rick Perry rally last week, had selected the song arbitrarily. Packing up his equipment, the man said he hadn't thought much about it: "I just saw it on my iTunes library," he said, "and I hit play."

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